Month: March 2011

Your content is important – every single piece of it! This includes both the content via copy as well as the rich media that you create day in and day out! There should be nothing that’s stopping your faithful readers to consume and engage with your content, right?

Unfortunately something that’s severely lacking innovation (and significant advancements) is in the area of RSS feed interpretation via RSS Readers. In other words, many of the RSS readers that your community is using (like Google Reader and many others) do not read your feeds with 100% accuracy, especially when it comes to formatting and rich media like video.

The problem? You’ll be scanning through your RSS feeds and suddenly you’ll see a huge blank spot in your reader where a video should be. Or you won’t even see a video at all! Doh!

Sometimes the smallest apps are some of the most brilliant and this one that I’m sharing with you today is no exception!

Take a look at the video above and just watch how I can quickly increase the speed at which I can blog! Instead of switching between windows and tabs I can keep a persistent screen of the content I’m interested in writing about on top of all my other screens, including the editor!

One of the most significant lessons that I’ve learned in the past few years as a blogger is to simply make sure that I’m actively listening to the community that I’m a part of.

The challenge for most bloggers is that they feel they either don’t have an audience at all that’s listening or they feel that they do but they aren’t actually doing anything about it (either on purpose or simply because of ignorance).

All that being said it’s definitely easier to listen when the community is small (and growing) but much harder as the community gets more large, more diverse, and definitely more opinionated on the topics that you’re covering and even about how you’re writing about them!

In fact, one of the first times you might even hear something at all from the community is when you change something about your writing style, WordPress Theme, or even something else that you might have felt was pretty innocuous but was actually critical for your visitor’s experience! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve changed up something on my blogs that I felt was pretty harmless only to get a tongue lashing from the community! Odd how that happens a lot, by the way.